Exam Preparation B2 C1 Lesson 3: Social Media

B2 C1 Exam Preparation Lesson 3 –

Social Media Marketing

You may have heard a lot of buzz recently about something called “social media marketing”, you know, marketing your businesses on places like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, and well, the list goes on.
People have probably told you that your business should be on these places, that the way we advertise in today’s world is changing, and that if you’re not involved in social media marketing your business is going to suffer.
The problem though, is that if you’re like most people you don’t have a clue where to even start. More on that in just a minute.
First, let’s take a closer look at Facebook and how it could help your business. Now, let’s say that one customer comes to your business and loves it. No big surprise, right?  Now, before social media you were lucky if that one customer told just one or two of their friends about the wonderful experience they had. But through the wonders of social media, whenever a customer shares the positive experience on a place like Facebook, they are going to be immediately telling all of their friends.
Now check this out. The average Facebook user has 200 friends. Let’s say that in a given month, five of your customers have a wonderful experience and post it to their Facebook account. If each of those five people have just 200 friends each that means that 1000 people are going to hear about the great time that these customers had coming to your place of business, And, as you can imagine, whenever someone receives a personal recommendation about something from a friend they’re going to be far more likely to use that service themselves.
In fact, according to a recent study performed by Nielsen, a shocking 92 percent of people trust recommendations from friends and family more than all other forms of marketing. That is just one of the many amazing ways that social media can help your business.
Being active on social media can also help you in the search engine rankings. You know, that Google stuff. It helps you manage your reputation online. It helps you brand your business. And, it’s a very cost effective form of marketing. What I said earlier about it being difficult to know what to do to market yourself on Facebook, well that’s where we come in. We specialise in helping local businesses market themselves through social media, and we would love to share more with you about who we are and how we can help.
To take the next step, all you have to do is follow the directions on this page. We look forward to hearing from you.

Predicting National Suicide Numbers with Social Media Data

Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, in the year 2020 approximately 1.53 million people will die from suicide. As Durkheim established, suicide is not a mere individual phenomenon, but it is influenced by social and environmental factors. These include economic indicators, social cohesion, publicized celebrity suicides, sunlight duration and temperature. Although these studies found meaningful results, few of them examined the public mood state.
Recently, several studies investigated associations between suicide and consumer behaviors related to the public mood. Studies on alcohol consumption and suicide suggest that population drinking tends to promote completed suicide. A recent study in Taiwan found a correlation between suicide and lottery sales that was interpreted as reflecting hopelessness at the social level. However, these consumer behaviors are at best indirect indicators of public mood.
Social media data such as weblog contents are more promising sources to gauge the public mood. Despite the diversity of content at an individual level, the aggregate of millions of social media data points may provide a pragmatic representation of public mood. Previous studies suggested new methods to measure national happiness by tracking the usage of key words among users of social media services. Moreover, it has been shown that online social media data can be used to predict changes in the stock market, influenza infection rates, and box office receipts. Therefore, social media data could be a promising source for investigating the association between suicide and public mood and for the refinement of suicide prediction models.
At 31 per 100,000, the annual suicide rate in South Korea is highest among the 30 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries as of 2009. In addition, South Korea is a global leader in internet infrastructure and usage. These conditions enabled us to investigate suicide and social media data. Our primary hypothesis was that social media variables are meaningfully associated with nation-wide suicide numbers. Our secondary aim was to develop and test a national suicide prediction model that incorporates social media data. As described in Methods, we extracted two candidate variables from a very large body of social media postings. These two variables focused on the topics of suicide and dysphoria in the form of frequency among weblog entries.

Hong-Hee Won
Samsung Biomedical Research Institute, Seoul, Korea
Woojae Myung, Doh Kwan Kim
Department of Psychiatry, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Korea
Gil-Young Song, Won-Hee Lee
Mining Laboratory, Daumsoft, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Jong-Won Kim
Laboratory Medicine and Genetics, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Korea
Bernard J. Carroll
Pacific Behavioral Research Foundation, Carmel, California, United States of America
(SOURCE: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0061809)

WRITING SKILLS

You can either:
* Complete 2 writing assignments. You have 40 minutes if you wish to complete one now. The 2nd assignment you can complete at home.
* You can also watch our Grammar VIDEO tutorials during the next 40 minutes if you prefer to complete the Writing at home.

For IELTS (Academic format), please select the ESSAY topic (250 words: in 40 minutes. Counts for 2/3 of the Writing score) and GRAPH DESCRIPTION (150 words: in 20 minutes. Counts for 1/3 of the Writing score). You will have 1h to complete both tasks on the day of the exam.

* ESSAY: It’s better to find information in a library than on the internet. Discuss the pros and cons.
* GRAPH DESCRIPTION:
CouchSurfing (Source: Wikipedia) “Couchsurfing International Inc. is a hospitality exchange and social networking website. The website provides a platform for members to “surf” on couches by staying as a guest at a host’s home, host travelers, or join an event.”
This visual aid shows countries with over 500 registered Couchsurfers as of 3 January 2011. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

For IELTS (General format), please select the ESSAY topic (250 words) and LETTER (150 words). You will have 1h to complete both tasks on the day of the exam.

* ESSAY: Write an essay exploring the change in the use of language since the invention of social network sites.
* LETTER: After many years avoiding social network sites you have finally decided to join one. Write a message to a friend explaining your decision and what you hope to gain from signing up.

For FCE, please select 2 of the following: ESSAY, LETTER/EMAIL, REPORT, or REVIEW. You will have 1h20 to complete the tasks on the day of the exam.

* ESSAY: Write an essay exploring the change in the use of language since the invention of social network sites.
* LETTER: After many years avoiding social network sites you have finally decided to join one. Write a message to a friend explaining your decision and what you hope to gain from signing up.
* REVIEW: You have just watched a documentary on the infringement of privacy laws committed by a social network site. Write a review of the site and its users, what it meant, what it means now.
* REPORT: Write a report on the increase in smart phone/social network usage.

For CAE, please select 2 of the following: ESSAY, LETTER/EMAIL, PROPOSAL, REPORT, or REVIEW. You will have 1h30 to complete the tasks on the day of the exam.
* ESSAY: Write an essay exploring the change in the use of language since the invention of social network sites.
* LETTER: After many years avoiding social network sites you have finally decided to join one. Write a message to a friend explaining your decision and what you hope to gain from signing up.
* REVIEW: You have just watched a documentary on the infringement of privacy laws committed by a social network site. Write a review of the site and its users, what it meant, what it means now.
* PROPOSAL: Write a proposal for a new social network site. What it offers its users, is there a cost? If not, how will it be funded? etc.
* REPORT: Write a report on the increase in smart phone/social network usage.

For TOEFL, please select the ESSAY topic and write a second essay response based on either the READING or LISTENING passage of the lesson. You will have 50 minutes to complete both essays on the day of the exam.

* ESSAY: Write an essay exploring the change in the use of language since the invention of social network sites.
* ESSAY: Essay response based on either the reading or listening passage of today’s lesson (Social Media): Social media marketing is an ever growing business strategy. Discuss the pros and cons of social media marketing for both the business and social media users.